Sunday Times, 29th
January 1978, John Peter
John Barton’s production of Congreve’s “The Way of the World” (RSC; Aldwych) is both a revelation and an indictment. I wonder how anyone could ever have called the play a comedy of manners. It is nothing of the kind: it is a comic drama of greed.
Barton opens the proceedings at a measured
conversational pace, slowly untangling Congreve’s labyrinthine plot and
revealing an everyday world of solid objects, calculating relationships and
palpable people who go about their business and intrigues (mostly intrigues)
with cool deliberation. I have never seen this play performed with such crisp
clarity, not heard its language, a virtuoso blend of polished venom and
rough-hewn colloquialism spoken with such lucid perfection.
But if Congreve could have been present he might
have felt a little uncomfortable. Barton’s production reveals that his
glittering prose adorns a deeply unpleasant world. That wouldn’t matter so much
if Congreve didn’t take such gleeful pleasure in exposing it. “The Way of the
World” is a brilliant but cold and disagreeable play about cold and
disagreeable people, and Barton spares neither them nor their author.
From the very first sight of Michael Pennington’s
Mirabell you know that you are in the presence of a hunter: a sensitive and
intelligent man, compassionate even, but one whose feelings have been tainted
by greed and who knows it. In his famous proposal scene with Millament he
stands, courtly but watchful, head thrust slightly forward, his thoughts
clearly focusing both on her body and her dowry. There’s not a trace of
affection in the air. Judi Dench’s Millament is a dainty praying mantis,
sensual but controlled. Under her arch, venomous wit lurks, just perceptibly, a
sense of brittle insecurity. Their duet is also a duel.
These two performances are among the best I’ve seen
in this theatre: a tour de force of timing and intelligence which transforms
the usual artificial badinage into a cut-and-thrust fight for marital
advantage. It is clearly going to be a stormy marriage. The other jewel of the
production is Beryl Reid’s Lady Wishfort. Congreve was cruel to this woman:
there’s something almost brutal in the way he ridicules the desires of someone
ageing and undesirable. Miss Reid gives a performance that might have shamed
him: she plays her not as a shrieking grotesque but as a simple, gullible,
fretful creature, silly but brave, and not without dignity. From the rest of
the cast let me single out Marjorie Bland’s sinuous, predatory Marwood; and
John Woodvine’s Fainall, a pompous sensualist with hooded eyes and a grim
smile: a wolf in the drawing room.
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